Women, feminism, and geek culture

OSCON CFP Deadline Today!

This is a guest post by Sarah Novotny, VP MySQL and LAMP Practice, Blue Gecko.Â She is a founder of Blue Gecko which does remote administration and management of databases around the world including MySQL, Oracle, Oracle E-Business Suite, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL.Â Her focus has been open databases since MySQL was in version 3.23. Â She is additionally the Program Chair of OSCON and the Chair of the IOUG’s MySQL Council. Â In her *funtime* she enjoys staring at walls and sitting quietly or doing pilates until she trembles.

I’m guest posting today to invite all the readers of Geek Feminism to spend 15 minutes thinking about a session you didn’t attend at another conference (because you knew much of the content, natch) and outline a proposal for this year’s OSCON. Â For those of you who are seasoned proposal submitters, thank you for your submissions and I entreat you to find another woman in technology that you know hasn’t submitted to OSCON this year and encourage her to do just that.

I spent the last weekend in January at She’s Geeky talking with women across geek disciplines and encouraging many to find an Open Source angle on their work and submit a talk. Â Increasing the number of women submitters and speakers at OSCON is one of the things I have been focusing on during the CFP. Â I love seeing women in the halls and on the speaking roster. Â And, each year I see a few more. Â Â I appreciate that O’Reilly Media is committed to encouraging diversity in it’s conferences and not just in the which shape of facial hair do I sport this week way.

But, on to the specifics of this year’s conference. We’re shaking things up again and among the perennial favorites we’ve added or finessed some new topics. Â Some directions you might want to spin your talk include:

Doing more with less – a perpetual favorite

Open source in smart phones and mobile networked devices

Cloud computing, openness in distributed services

Geek lifestyle – hacking, quantified self, inbox zero, maker culture

Best practices for building a business around open source

Open web, open standards, open data, open, open, open!

Open source in democracy, politics, government, and education

AI, machine learning, and other ways of making software smarter than the people using it

OSCON will be held again this year in Portland Oregon. Â For those who don’t know, Portland is the home of an awesome food cart, geek and DIY culture. Â This culture contributes to the success of OSCON each year and to the cross discipline (and i mean Java vs Ruby vs Operations vs Business) pollination that happens.

Geeks are inherently curious, get out your keyboard and share how you do what you do!